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Mobile commerce: what you need to know

Between summer 2011 and summer 2012, traffic to ecommerce sites from smart phones and tablets grew by up to 200%. Warren Knight, CEO and co-founder of social sharing and ecommerce platform Gloople, explains why mobile commerce is becoming more important every day.

Catering for mobile shoppers

I was recently with a new client who sells men's clothing. The first thing I helped them with was to understand their online customers through Google Analytics. To their surprise, not only had they seen a massive increase in mobile and tablet visitors and customers, but mobile customers were spending 10% more than other customers.

This is definitely not an anomaly. It's something I've seen time and time again. It's time to pay attention.

The big turnoff

The biggest turnoff for mobile shoppers is the difficult customer acquisition journey. This is the step by step process a website visitor goes through in order to purchase a product.

Some online stores lose sales because their website is either archaic or non-responsive, meaning that the journey of purchasing a product is intolerable. The result is that visitors leave the website without purchasing anything.

Changing purchase habits

The way people purchase goods has changed since the days of going to a store and paying cash for it. Don’t get me wrong - in-store shopping is still leading in sales. However, most people will no longer drive hours to a shop just to find that what they want no longer exists.

There's been a big shift towards online shopping, and mobile commerce is the next logical progression. Indeed, eBay alone has 300 - 400 employees working on mobile solutions, with the company expecting to rack up mobile sales worth $10bn in 2012.

Mobile devices are becoming a central part of our lives and should be used as tools to help us shop and pay. With most mobile phones now coming with either 3G, 4G or the ability to connect via a wireless network, there is no excuse in avoiding the inevitable. Mobile commerce is the future.